Four more years for Obama

President gets our endorsement, with reservations

We still imagine a federal government whose officials value debate and compromise, because these produce the best laws.

We can envision a president who consistently and clearly enunciates our national agenda, so Americans are reminded - and the world understands - who we are.

We are owed a national surplus and the economic stability - and safety net - it creates.

And we remember presidents - Reagan, Clinton - who could roll up their sleeves, horse-trade with political opponents and spare us the embarrassment of a government brought to a standstill by special interests and Big Money.

Shackled as this presidential election is to the dysfunctional and disingenuous politics of Washington, we nonetheless hoped for a candidate who also imagined the kind of nation we deserve.

In a moment when we need a great leader more than ever, we were hoping for a better choice than President Obama or Gov. Mitt Romney.

However well-intentioned, neither candidate makes an endorsement easy - which is why this one reflects more on what America deserves, rather than what either is promising.

We hoped for inspiration, and a more practical game plan for restoring America to greatness.

We hoped to be reminded about what unites Americans, not what divides us, because how many more years can we sacrifice to the self-absorption of our current government?

How will each candidate bridge divisions? What compromises will they pursue to put the nation back on track? We still don't know.

But we know a lot about negative, defensive campaigns that have only served to further divide a divided nation. The campaigns have been characterized by partisan sniping of the kind that has produced the gridlock in Washington that has kept the country from moving forward on so many issues - deficit reduction, entitlement reform, immigration reform, energy policy, to name a few.

Despite his shortcomings in providing the nation with inspiring leadership, we believe President Obama offers the best prospects for a stronger economy and a stronger nation over the next four years. We saw the way he inspired the nation with his hope and change campaign four years ago. And we have seen him do some good things during his first term.

He kept the nation from falling into the abyss of another Great Depression. As weak as the economy is today, it could have been far worse.

President Obama has kept the nation safe. Osama bin Laden was killed under his watch. He ended the war in Iraq. He soon will be ending the war in Afghanistan. He has taken deliberate, judicious steps in dealing with Iran, Syria and Pakistan. And he is firmly committed to defending Israel.

He has overseen badly needed financial reform. He pushed through a health care plan that has expanded coverage to millions of uninsured, prevented insurance companies from refusing coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowed young adults up to age 26 to remain on their parents' policies. The plan is flawed but not irredeemably so.

Given Mitt Romney's experience as a corporate CEO and a turnaround specialist, and his successes as governor of a progressive state, we were eager for the details on how he would turn around the company that needs it most - the United States of America.

His prescription for closing the deficit, creating jobs and jump-starting the economy has been too vague to believe in.

We cannot calculate how the centerpiece of Romney's economic plan - cutting income taxes across the board by 20 percent, reducing corporate taxes by nearly 30 percent, permanently eliminating the estate tax and repealing the alternative minimum tax - could possibly work.

He says he will do it by closing so-far unidentified tax loopholes, making deep cuts to federal programs and increasing federal tax revenues through the stimulus created by his tax cuts. But the math doesn't add up.

Obama policies have been consistent, and we agree with many of his positions. And it is impossible to overlook the challenges he faced when he took office. He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, which took America more than a decade - and an economy jump-started by our entrance into a world war - to right itself.

By the time Obama was inaugurated, the stock market had lost 50 percent of its value from just two years earlier. Joblessness was on an upward trajectory, rising from 4.7 percent in July 2007, to 8.2 percent the month after he took office, to its peak of 10 percent later in 2009. The month before he was sworn in, the national housing price index, which had been falling since its zenith in 2006, had its largest one-year price drop in history - 18 percent. Housing prices tumbled 30 percent on average, and the real estate market came to a virtual standstill. Obama has not turned things around. But he has stanched the bleeding. He deserves credit for that.

Should he have done more? Yes. Has he used the situation he inherited as an excuse for not doing more? Probably. But his plan to create jobs has been blocked by Republicans in Congress, as has his program to reduce the widening budget deficit through a combination of budget cuts and tax increases on the wealthiest 2 percent. He has faced Republican intransigence at virtually every turn.

But the test of a great president is someone who can overcome objections, who can create the kinds of personal relationships with key lawmakers that allow them to work together to hammer out compromises. It is a skill Obama needs to develop.

Four years ago, we endorsed Obama and his hope and change. We haven't gotten all the change we were looking for. But we haven't lost hope that Obama can finally deliver on the promises he made so eloquently on the campaign trail four years ago.

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Four more years for Obama

We still imagine a federal government whose officials value debate and compromise, because these produce the best laws.

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